Is Your Salesforce Data Really Safe? Few Questions to Help Us Find Out

Is your data safe with Salesforce? Yes, it is a question, quite unimaginable!! But it’s true!!

There have been 20 hours of service outage, which is even said to effect Salesforce. When we talk about Salesforce, it is rated as #1 CRM tool. The service is designed for global availability and redundancy. In other words, a SaaS-based company in its real sense. Still, it happened, and the frightening reality is that even Saas applications and services can experience such mishaps – including the biggest players like Salesforce. Hence, we are standing in reality, where even Salesforce is not considered safe.

Today we will discuss five questions, that will help us develop a comprehensive plan for protecting the critical Salesforce data.

• What does Salesforce recommend for Data Protection?

The Salesforce Help Center mentions “Although Salesforce does maintain all the backup data and can recover it, it is vital to constantly backup your own data locally so that you have the ability to restore it to avoid relying on Salesforce for backups to recover your data.”

In the event of accidental deletion of your data, it might happen that you get a slow and an expensive data recovery service. Waiting for so long to recover the CRM data can prove to be harmful to some organizations. Hence, concerning both money and time, which is unacceptable.

• What are the various factors that could impact your Salesforce Data integrity?

Threats to your Salesforce Data Integrity can come from any direction. It might seem that the process runs smoothly, yet errors can be introduced from various area. However, the concerned areas include the following:

All Third-Party Apps – Most of the SaaS-based tools, including Salesforce always offers integration with third-party apps. The app extends the functionality of the core service to a more valuable business proposition. This is in one way helps in increasing the productivity. While on the other hand, they can even alter your data in unexpected ways, ultimately leading to recovery challenge and data corruption.

User Error – Most commonly the Salesforce data is operated by multiple users, such as Sales Team, Marketing Team, etc. Public Reports are an excellent example of such situations where users have access to update or delete records. It is a process that opens the door for the possibility of malicious activities.

Data Migration or Updates – Though it is said that the admins are doing thorough checks before performing bulk updates for records. It is not an unusual happening that one may encounter duplicate files or incorrectly updated fields. This process can at the end make your data ineffective.

• Are you Prepared to react to a litigation request that would require your organization‘s data to be made available?

In the year 2014, almost 34% of the companies faced at least one lawsuit with nearly $20 Million at issue. As per this, there is a clear threat of litigation, and hence, the demands for e-discovery is considered to be a real concern for companies of all sizes.

With the growth of businesses adopting more Saas based tools in their day-to-day business operations courts is gradually increasing the production of cloud data as evidence in all legal proceedings.

• Does any Salesforce data adhere to your company’s compliance needs?

It is true that businesses today are subjected to many compliance data handling requirements. These conditions often involve the safeguarding of sensitive customer information. This information includes CRM data, PII (personally identifiable information), etc. hence, it is highly important that you have a comprehensive data management strategy.

• How much does it cost, if you lose your data?

Salesforce as a SaaS-based tool has proven themselves to be a real boon for companies, allowing them to both consolidate and at the same time centralizing the CRM data, making it available to their teams in any

place, at any time. Hence, a granular analysis of this data can be performed, thereby empowering them to manage better the relationships with current customers and as well as better identify potential clients.

But what would happen if this data is suddenly not available? Yes, it is true that Salesforce could even end up compensating its customers to almost an amount of $20 for the last month outage.

Conclusion:

After a complete analysis of the entire situation, one can come to the conclusion that Salesforce or any other Saas-based service providers are not completely reliable for your data management. For a real peace of mind, it is always recommended to have an own backup plan in place.

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